The Modern Seneschal
Some centuries ago, nobles learned about the riches in their estate through their seneschal, who would walk about counting things.
10 lambs, 8 sheep, 1 exceptional sheep, 2 sickly sheep, 50 pounds of turnip, 400 pounds of cabbage,...
So on and on the counting would continue, so that the lord knew how much wealth he owned. Of course nowadays counting money doesn't take so much time or manpower. Someone can just have 'one million pounds' and we know what that entails, or what it could potentially entail when cached out, in terms of actual stuff.
This is bad news for seneschals, who are all out of a job nowadays, but good news for anyone who pays for things with money instead of chickens. Money works well for people. But not so much for the news.
The people on the news broadcasts recklessly announce 'the pound has fallen', without a hint of explanation, to an audience of people who mostly do not have degrees in Economics. Of course, they hear this as bad news; if their granny had fallen it would be bad, and how could anything have a good fall? The audience also understands that they should understand what the people on the news say, or why would the news people be telling them? They've not been given a hint of the fact that the UK can set its own exchange rate for the pound. So when the pound 'falls', someone's decided that giving away more pounds per euro will make British businesses more competitive, so that people will buy our stuff...well not stuff, our services, since we don't have any stuff to sell in the UK, or at least nothing that anyone would want.
The same applies to everyone talking about the 'national debt', so it feels pretty shitty to hear snobbery from people who have the spare time to go traipsing around Wikipedia, on how the uneducated imagine that a country's debt works like their debt.
"Britain's national debt has risen 38%"
That's a clear statement that we owe money. We, the British, pay our taxes, build roads, and vote for ministers to oversee the whole thing. So this sentence clearly means we have borrowed together (just as we invest and spend together), and have borrowed too much. And if that sentence doesn't mean what it appears to mean to everyone who's not in-on-the-joke, then I'm less interested in hearing the joke, and more interested in knowing how the news people aren't simply lying to everyone.
Perhaps the BBC news people earnestly want to keep the British public in the loop, and struggle, because any sufficiently advanced economics is indistinguishable from magic. A million pounds is a lot of money, but ten billion pounds looks like some kind of glitch. A millionaire could could buy 580 metric tons of apples, which is clearly too many apples for anything. But a billionaire can buy so many apples that they actually can't buy that many apples.
With all the abstraction accumulating, I sometimes ponder the alternative - counting all the sheep, smartphones, and spoons in the UK. It doesn't matter how ludicrous the idea is, we're already in a mad land of abstractions, and I want a breather.
Finger-pointing aside, I have some positive reasons for wanting to hire some speedy seneschals to run about counting chickens again:
- Nobody's tried it in a long while, so we should probably check again, just in case it actually works.
- Smartphones, smart TVs, smart fridges, and (by definition) smart spoons, don't need a seneschal any more, because of the wi-fi. We could just ask the CIA to tell us how rich we all are instead, and they'll send over an Excel spreadsheet.
- When money-numbers go up and down, nobody knows what that means except for some Economists, and I can't tell which of them are bullshitting. But if lots of people are buying massive smart TVs at the same time as pounds getting cheaper (i.e. 'falling'), then most people's basic shopping-senses would fill in the rest of the picture for them.